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Who was Cassandra?

In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well, you know what happened.

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December 31, 2018

In the past year, I read fewer books than usual, but if anything I thought about them more. The year began with a big project: reading Homer's Odyssey chapter by chapter with two other friends, each of us reading a different translation and discussing them online. As the only one of the three readers with any ancient Greek, I was the one who looked up and struggled through passages we wanted to compare. This not only revived my interest in the language but rekindled my desire to go to Greece, which came true at the end of the year. The final book I'm reading, Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven, is a novelistic treatment of the life of Alexander the Great, whose Macedonian birthplace we visited. There were a number of other classical books, or works inspired by them, in the early part of 2018 - specifically several by Seamus Heaney; Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire, a version of Antigone with an immigrant heroine and her brother, a suspected ISIS terrorist; Alice Oswald's Memorial, a poem that lists all the deaths mentioned in the Iliad, and Daniel Mendelsohn's An Odyssey, about teaching the book to a class that included his own father and then going on a trip with him that recreated the ancient voyage.

Besides this focus, books I particularly enjoyed in the past year were William Finnegan's Barbarian Days, an autobiographical book about surfing that held me riveted from the first to the last page; Cesar Aira's bizarre and miraculous Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, Michael Ondaatje's luminous latest novel, Warlight, set in post-WWII London,, and Men Without Women, Haruki Murakami's most recent collection of short stories, many of which appeared first in The New Yorker.

The book that impressed me the most was probably The Diaries of Emilio Renzi, Vol 1: The Formative Years, by Ricardo Piglia, one of the greatest of all Latin American writers. When diagnosed with a terminal illness, he spent the last ten years of his life compiling, revising and editing the huge volume of journal notebooks he had kept throughout it under the name of his alter-ego, Emilio Renzi. They are just now being published in English. The concept is monumental, and the writing extremely compelling; for someone like me who has kept journals off and on all her life (including this blog) it was a mind-bending project. Vol 1 covers the years when he was beginning to want to be a writer, through university, and up to the time his first book was published that brought him acclaim -- so it is the diary of a writer becoming a writer. It was a great contrast to last year's mammoth project (Knausgaard). Volume 2, The Happy Years, came out in November, and I look forward to reading it. I followed Vol 1 with one of Piglia's novels, which was great, but confess I liked the journals better. If you like Bolano, you will appreciate these.

Finally, in the fall, Jonathan and I both read William Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium, a memoir of the writer's pilgrimage in the footsteps of 6th-century monk John Moschos who visited Orthodox monasteries all over the Byzantine world of his time. Dalrymple's journey begins on Mt Athos, Greece, takes us to Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the West Bank, and ends in the Egyptian desert. The book was written in 1997 and chronicled not only where Moschos went, but the lived reality of the same monasteries fourteen centuries later, most of which were, or had been, under attack by other religions and political groups and were currently inhabited by only a handful of monks; his own visits sometimes alerted the authorities and endangered the present monks, who could be accused of harboring a spy. But it was exactly the right book for us to read before our own first trip to see the Byzantine world at closer quarters; I'll be writing about our trip to the ancient monasteries at Meteora, Greece very soon.

As always, I look forward to hearing what you've been reading too, so please post your lists in the comments as well as your reactions to any of what I've said or listed here! And best wishes for happy reading adventures in 2019! I'm anxious to read the next Piglia, as I said, and the new Murakami novel, Killing Commendatore; also on my list is the Alexandria Quartet of Lawrence Durrell, and The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel about Sicily. How about you?

2018 (**=favorites)

Fire from Heaven (Alexander the Great trilogy, Vol 1), Mary Renault

**Men Without Women, Haruki Murakami

A Sort of Life, Graham Greene

**From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium, William Dalrymple

January 16, 2018

It's one thing to have a few bitter cold days now and then: that's just part of living in the north. But the cold has been unrelenting up here for more than a month; I can hardly remember a winter when it was below 0 degrees F. for so long. The Celsius readings have hovered around -19 to -23, and out in the country they've been in the minus 30s. Today is a heat wave - about 12 degrees F.! It feels almost balmy! The mountain of plowed snow in the studio parking lot has become a mountain range, and I'm grateful every day that I don't have to keep shoveling out a car that's parked on a city street: people are really having a hard time this year.

Between Christmas and New Year's, we built ourselves a new IKEA bed, and completely tore apart and rearranged our bedroom. Meanwhile, my husband's computer underwent an automatic operating system upgrade that trashed everything, so he spent a lot of the holiday week trying to reconstruct his digital life. Then the same thing happened to mine. We had daily backups, so there was little damage or loss, it was just a pain in the neck. He quickly got my computer back up and running, but yesterday I realized that all my accounting files for Phoenicia had been in a different location, and the data starting from the middle of 2016 was gone, and not backed up where it should have been. Today I began reconstructing them. Strangely, it hasn't put me into too bad a mood. Like many other things, I figure I'll just do a little bit every day, and eventually it will be done. The cliches run through my head: "No use crying over spilt milk"; "what's done is done."

We've also had the inevitable mid-winter colds, sneezing and coughing our way through the month. Unlike Europe, our January and February here in eastern Canada tend to be bright and sunny a lot of the time, so I haven't felt depressed by grey days. What the cold does is make me feel cooped up, because I can't walk: it's far too cold and far too icy underfoot for walking-as-exercise. So, although I try not to make New Year's resolutions, I did vow to get back to the pool and to some sort of exercise regimen. That began last week in earnest, and it does feel better.

A double-length cowl in progress, in Alegria yarn from Manos del Uruguay.

I'm working on the design and layout for the new book by Luisa A. Igloria that Phoenicia will be publishing in March, The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis. And I'm trying to draw a little every day, and finish a knitting project, and cooking soups and stews and baking bread, as well as reading The Odyssey again, along with two friends. We're each reading a different translation (I'm reading Fagles, the others are reading Wilson and Lombardo), one Book a day, and talking about them as we go - a perfect midwinter project that reminds me of Sicily and the Mediterranean, and the Greek cities we visited.

Circe turning Odysseus' men into swine, from The Golden Iliad and Odyssey, by Martin and Alice Provensen: the book that first hooked me on the classical myths, and still has my all-time favorite illustrations. The look on Odysseus' face, in the background, is priceless.

December 27, 2017

With the sigh that always precedes the first page of a massive reading project, I moved on from the final book of Elena Ferrante's sprawling, steamy, and gritty Neapolitan Quartet, which I loved and which had been a precursor to our travels in southern Italy, to the chilly and tormented Scandinavia of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle. In the spring of 2017, the writer Amitava Kumar posted a picture of himself with Karl Ove Knausgaard at the Icelandic Literary Festival. I wrote to Amitava (we follow each other on Instagram) saying that the photograph had felt like a sign that I couldn't avoid these books any longer. Later I wrote again: "I'm nearly through three of the volumes, and finding them disturbing, illuminating, and absolutely brilliant. But among my literary friends I can't find a single one who's actually read the books!"

Later, of course, I did find friends who had read them: longtime commenter, poet, and London friend Jean Morris, for instance, who shares my opinion. It seems that readers either love or hate Knausgaard, the latter type dismissing him as a narcissistic egotist, in love with his own voice. I'm in the former camp: I think what he has done is a contemporary continuation of the efforts of Joyce and Wolff to redefine the novel and convey the inner workings of our minds, in all their mundane detail as well as their occasional glorious heights of insight and expression. He has also been willing to cut himself wide open and risk both personal criticism and his closest relationships for the sake of the call of his literary work. I could not do it, but my work won't last, either: Knausgaard's will.

Like the New Yorker critic James Woods, I found the books "fascinating even when I was bored." Much of the writing is not boring at all, and although some women apparently are not, I was riveted by his detailed description of being male, from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood; it's not like anything I've ever read. While his extremely difficult relationship with his father is central to the books, I especially remember his accounts of his own struggles as a parent and husband: being the reluctant but dutiful child-carer for his young children while his wife was going back to school, how emasculated he felt, how bored and resentful; how painful it was for him to enter into a shared social life, how love and family obligation constantly conflicted with his desire to be alone and writing; how this affected his marriage, how guilty he felt for quarreling and how impossible it was not to. I cringed reading about his childhood relationships with other boys, and his sexual problems as a young man, but there too, I felt privileged for the window into a world I didn't know, and grateful that he had the courage to write such things down in excruciating detail.

So I admired his brutal honesty, and found that the greatest impact of the books was the way they forced me to examine or even analyze my own mind and heart: what did I really feel? I suppose I do this anyway, perhaps more than many people, but Knausgaard's honesty insists on your own -- perhaps this is one reason he makes many readers uncomfortable. I'm with the reviewer (Rachel Cusk) who called his work "the most significant literary enterprise of our times."

The statistics on my book list this year are unremarkable: 30 books, instead of the usual 35-40; 12 by women, 18 by men. 17 e-books, 1 audiobook. The lower overall count is because so many of these books were massive, dominated mostly by the Knausgaard series, each of which is over 600 pages. Encouraged by my husband, I've listened to more podcasts, watched more tv drama series and documentaries. I've read a lot of things online, and kept up with blogs and journals, but I was also writing seriously for a lot of these months. So I've been reading all the time, but the mix has changed, and there have been fewer and fewer printed books in my hands: perhaps an ominous statistic for a publisher.

I read and liked Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond -- quirky, disturbing and original -- having seen that Knausgaard recommended her work. Other standout novels in this year's list were Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, which I re-read with my book group, and John Berger's G, which I'd somehow never read before.

The Danish Girl, by David Ebershoff, is a sensitive and often painful exploration of one of the life and relationships of one of the earliest transgender surgery patients. Ebershoff was my friend Teju Cole's editor for Open City, and we met at the launch party for that book; I enjoyed talking to him and was glad to read his own writing. I also read Suspended Sentences, a trilogy of three short novels by Nobel winner Patrick Modiano, on the recommendation of my friend, avid reader Bill Gordh -- I'll definitely be reading more of Modiano's work.

Teju's Blind Spot was, of course, a favorite and without doubt the most important book to me, personally, last year: original, beautiful, searching, and truly genre-bending -- the sort of book I wish publishers still risked, but seldom do. I was delighted that Random House published it, after the original Italian printing, and in such a fine edition. I also greatly appreciated the photobooks My Dakota by Rebecca Norris Webb, and La Calle by Alex Webb, with essays and photographs about Mexico.

Other than the novels, much of my reading was connected with travels to Rome in 2016 and Sicily this year. Back when I was studying classics, I focused mainly on ancient Greece, so after being surrounded by Roman architecture, art, and inscriptions in Italy, I was inspired to read more about the ancient Romans, beginning with Mary Beard's eminently approachable S.P.Q.R. and moving on to some of the philosophers I had never read, such as Cicero and Marcus Aurelius. Two books about Sicily that I've found both enjoyable and valuable were The Stone Boudoir: Travels Through the Hidden Villages of Sicily, by Theresa Maggio, a writer from Brattleboro, Vermont, whose family roots are Sicilian, and British historian John Julius Norwich's essential Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History.

I've read a number of poetry manuscripts this year, including two that I've chosen to publish through Phoenicia in 2018, but the book of poems that has kept me company was The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013. As I wrote to Dave Bonta for his year-end list, "It's a big book, and it's been beside the bed all year, where I've dipped into it for an hour or just a few minutes, always finding phrases or metaphors, descriptions and emotions that touch me. Walcott's background was entirely different from mine, but we shared some loves, such as classical literature, European cities, the sea, nature, and watercolor painting. But I've been moved the most by his writing about being a black man in a white world, his writing about the American South, and his poems about the Caribbean, where he felt at home. His mastery of the English language is complete. I think this collection has brought me a lot closer to sensing the man behind the poems." The new book on my bedside will be Les cent plus beaux poemes quebecois: a Christmas gift from my friend Carole, and I pledge to read one poem from it every day.

So, here's the 2017 list: how about yours? What are the most memorable books you've read in past year? Or even the worst ones? I always appreciate the thoughts you share in the comments or send me by email after this annual post. And happy reading in 2018!

December 26, 2016

Without further ado, here are the books I read during the past year, in reverse chronological order. Commentary begins below the list.

* indicates books read as e-books

2016

"The Golden Bough," an oil by Joseph Mallord William Turner, shows the scene from The Aeneid that began Frazer's exploration in The Golden Bough.

The Golden Bough, James George Frazer (in progress)*

Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, J. W. N. Sullivan (in progress)

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector*

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante*

A Most Wanted Man, John le Carre

The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante*

The Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante*

The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It, Molly Bashaw

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami

Conversations with a Dead Man, Mark Abley

My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante*

Outline, Rachel Cusk

The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit*

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (re-read)

Known and Strange Things, Teju Cole

Ice Mountain, Dave Bonta

Lunch with a Bigot, Amitava Kumar*

The Inugami Mochi, Jessamyn Smyth*

Pastrix, Nadia Bolz-Weber*

Traveling Mercies, Anne LaMott

A Whole Life, Robert Seethaler*

Monster, Jeneva Burroughs Stone

A Strangeness in My Mind, Orhan Pamuk** (dnf)

Poems, Michael Ondaatje

M Train, Patti Smith

Just Kids, Patti Smith*

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Horrors, J. K. Rowling

Thesaurus of Separation, Tim Mayo

Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Cesar Aira*

The Sound of the Mountain, Yasunari Kawabata*

Leaving Berlin, Joseph Kanon*

The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano

The Japanese Lover, Isabel Allende*

First, the stats: 33 titles, of which 17 were e-books, either from Kindle or downloaded on OverDrive from the Bibliotheque nationale. I'm pleased to see an almost-perfect split between books by female and male authors, too.

There were so many outstanding books this year, that I might be better off to say which ones I don't recommend -- but I'd rather be positive. My vote for best-book/should-last-forever would have to be Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, but I also particularly liked the beautifully written M Train, by Patti Smith, the quirky and detailed Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by Cesar Aira, Murakami's brilliant Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and the Elena Ferrante Neapolitan Quartet, of which I've read three and am anxiously awaiting #4, on hold from the library.

Most of you know that I'm a Murakami fan and have read most of his books; I also know he's not to everyone's taste. Wind-Up Bird held up very well the second time around. Kafka on the Shore, which I also read this year, is a fine novel too but not (for me anyway) on the same level as Bird or IQ84, probably my favorite so far of his novels.

Then, what can I say objectively about books by friends, or books I read in manuscript and then published? Of the former, I greatly enjoyed Jessamyn Smyth's The Inugami Mochi, the story of her dog Gilgamesh and their remarkable relationship. I was privileged to take a long walk with the two of them, some years ago, so I felt like I had already had a small window into the material she wrote about after his passing; it's a beautiful book that challenges many people's assumptions about communication and relationship between humans and animals, but for me it was not a big leap. I've already written about Dave Bonta's Ice Mountain: An Elegy, which I liked enough to want to illustrate and publish. And while many illustrious readers and critics have chosen Teju Cole's Known and Strange Things for their own top-ten-of 2016 book lists, and I totally concur, I'm also quietly proud that a couple of the included essays had their origins here on this blog. Jeneva Burroughs Stone's Monster and Tim Mayo's Thesaurus of Separation round out this paragraph, the first by a poet and essayist I met, like Jessamyn, through qarrtsiluni, and the second by a Vermont poet I had never met, but whose work and friendship I now value very much.

The very best book of poetry I read this year was Molly Bashaw’s The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It (The Word Works, 2014.) I recommended this for Dave's crowd-sourced compendium of favorite poetry books of the year, writing, "The poems, ostensibly about farming and farm life, are of course — as Heaney showed us so convincingly — about life itself, in all its beauty, bewilderment, and violence. I was impressed by Bashaw’s use of language, and deeply moved by her ability to describe but not over-explain, because so much of what she talks about defies explanation or even analysis. She leaves things as they are, but also leaves a great deal of room for the reader. Barhaw grew up on small farms in New England and upstate New York, but graduated from the Eastman School of Music and worked for 12 years in Germany as a professional bass-trombonist — so it’s probably no surprise that her poems resonated with me. She’s young and her work has won a bunch of prizes but that doesn’t matter to me; I certainly wish I had published this first book of hers myself and hope to meet the poet someday so I can tell her."

But it's the Ferrante books that have a real hold on me. She manages that rare feat of writing a gripping story that seems absolutely true to life, and writing extremely well. There's a conversation between the elusive Ferrante and author Sheila Heti in the latest issue of Brick, in which Heti remarks that these books make her lament the number of unwritten or unknown books by women, about women, throughout the centuries - what a loss this is for literature, and also for our knowledge of ourselves. I have found them absolutely riveting for the same reasons I love Virginia Woolf: her ability and desire to enter into the heads of her characters and bring their thought processes, and therefore themselves, to life.

So, let me know what you think, and also what you've been reading - I always look forward to the annual lists that some of you share with us here, too! And I hope everyone is having some extra time this week to curl up with a book.

January 04, 2016

My New Year's Eve visitor this year was a hard cold, so I've been welcoming January 2016 from the couch. I haven't been sick for quite a while, so the enforced slowdown has been an adjustment and - now that I'm feeling somewhat better - a not unwelcome one. I've been drawing and painting a little bit, and last night I read through a couple of Bach preludes and fugues, but mostly I'm drinking hot tea with some local miel urbain, a Christmas gift that was gathered from hives on the roofs of UQAM, and reading Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives: set in Mexico City, and utterly brilliant.

I don't know how it's taken me this long to get to Bolaño... but there it is. J. read this novel first and loved it very much (this from someone who rarely reads novels at all) and I impatiently waited for him to hand over the library copy. Meanwhile I've been reading a bit of Bolaño's poetry, which I like enough to want the large collection, The Unknown University. This unpublished poem was found in one of his notebooks containing some of the poems for the book, published posthumously:

My Literary Career

Rejections from Anagrama, Grijalbo, Planeta, certainly also from Alfaguara,

Mondadori. A no from Muchnik, Seix Barral, Destino...All the publishers...All the readers

December 30, 2015

As 2015 draws to a close, it's time for the annual Cassandra Pages book list. It's shorter than it has been in many years, partly because (I sheepishly admit) after days of working on Phoenicia and design projects and art, we've gotten in a habit of watching an episode or two of TV mini-series in the evenings, and that cuts into my reading time. But the other reason is that several of the books were big reads, and took a long time to finish - and turned out to be highlights of my reading year. So here's the list, with some comments following:

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Haruki Murakami*

DNFs:

Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver

Bell of the Desert, Alan Gold

--

So, it was a year of reading Japanese novels, and contemporary Icelandic literature, with a big chunk of V.S. Naipaul thrown in. My fascination with the work of Haruki Murakami continues: the year began with his great recent novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage; I listened to his memoir about writing and running while working out last winter on the elliptical in our building's basement, and finally tackled "the big one": IQ84 this fall - and loved every minute of it; I could barely put it down. In December I read the recently-released English translations of his two earliest novellas. Murakami had been reluctant to have them translated and published, because he considers them to be warm-ups, written as he was finding his voice and before he developed his mature style. I agreed that they weren't up to the later standard, not at all, but they gave a fascinating glimpse into his own youth and some of the themes that he's returned to again and again, as well as test vehicles for the particular voice and style that characterizes his later novels, of which IQ84 is the masterpiece, a surrealistic tour-de-force that had me captivated and amazed from beginning to end.

I enjoyed reading books by friends, in particular the scary and beautifully-written Glimmerglass by Marly Youmans (Clive Hicks-Jenkins, illustrator and cover designer) vividly set in Cooperstown, a place I know quite well, and Night Fishing at Antibes, an experimental poetry collaboration and response to the Picasso painting, by Teresa Gilman and three other poets.

Knowing I was interested in Nordic writing and culture, my friend Ed recommended Per Petterson's I Curse the River of Time. He told me he had picked it up mostly because he liked the title and said it wasn't a book he'd have normally liked, but he did - and so did I. It's a rather grim, dark story of a man who should be more adult than he is, his relationship with his mother, and the way he keeps making a hash of things; very well written and compelling, even though it makes you cringe.

Continuing the Nordic theme, I liked all three of the Icelandic books I read: an anthology of contemporary poetry, an historical novel, and a recent novel about a mother from Reykjavik, her delinquent daughter, her best friend (a flautist), and the trip the three of them take around the southern coast of Iceland - nearly the same route we were to follow a month later. This one, Places of the Heart, by Sigrun Sigursdottir, is a terrific book and deserving winner of recent Icelandic fiction awards. It gave me a look, beyond tourism and the lives of my own friends, into the seamier side of Icelandic culture, what it means for young people to be stuck on an island in the north Atlantic, and also the relationship they have with their astounding and dangerous landscape. The passages describing the land were lyrical, raw, loving, and real, and added immeasurably to my own experience when I stood in the same places myself - for instance, the book contains a harrowing trip across these same black glacial sands during a sandstorm.

The other big book of the year was V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, which I read with my friend Teju as he was preparing to write the introduction to a new edition published by Picador Classics. This is Naipaul's early masterpiece, a sweeping family saga, drawn from his own experiences as a young man growing up in post-colonial Trinidad. I was swept into the world of the novel - so unfamiliar to me - and it remains embedded in my consciousness. Best of all, the book contains little of the rage that mars so many of Naipaul's later works, so that his magnificent prose can simple be read and appreciated.

My most memorable book of the year, though, was 1968 Nobel prize winner Yasunari Kawabata's Beauty and Sadness. Because of Murakami, I had been looking for other Japanese novels to read, and after trying and putting aside a couple of books by Kenzaburo Oe (either because I didn't feel caught up in the story or because the books were set elsewhere than Japan) began this one by Kawabata, who I had never read. It's a quiet book that contains a chilling story about human nature, desire, and jealousy, and I was gripped by it, aware that I was reading the work of an absolute master. I'd recommend this book to any lover of literature, and what I am looking forward to the most in 2016 is reading more of Kawabata's work.

Finally, I wanted to mention that I read or listened to a lot of books in 2015 through a relatively new library service called OverDrive. You sign up for an account through a participating library where you have a membership (I use the Bibliotheque nationale de Quebec) and this gives you access to a large and ever-expanding collection of English-language e-books and audio books, available for free download for a period of 21 days. It works beautifully; I tend to download the books to my phone and read them there, wherever I happen to be. It's great!

So...happy reading, and, as always, I'd love to hear about your own book list and favorites of the past year in the comments!

December 29, 2014

Well, we're almost at the end of 2014, so in keeping with tradition, here's my book list for this past year. I didn't read as many titles as in some years, but there are a couple of real tomes in there too. I've been enjoying a new way of reading: borrowing e-books and audiobooks for free via OverDrive, through the Bibliotheque Nationale. You do it all via your own computer, and can download books to read there or on your tablet or phone. The selection increases all the time, and books can be borrowed for period of 21 days and renewed after that.

I greatly enjoyed the big new biography of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and subsequently re-read some of his works. Other particular highlights of the year were Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; my friend Tom Montag's poetry collection In This Place;Interior Circuit by Francisco Goldman and City of Palaces by Michael Nava - both books about Mexico City; and the wonderful Out of Arizona by frequent Cassandra Pages commenter Roderick Robinson.

For Christmas I was completely surprised and delighted to receive a special gift from J.: a signed copy of Seamus Heaney's North. I'm slowly reading through that now.

September 13, 2014

Things have been so busy around here, between work deadlines and getting ready to launch J.'s new book (yes! at last!), that I haven't had much time to blog. But here is a question for us to ponder. The other day during a break, as we sat in our studio drinking coffee and talking about the books we're reading and the things we've been writing, J. asked me: "Do you think writing is getting more important or less so?"

I thought that was a pretty profound question, and I don't know the answer; I'm not even sure what I think. He elaborated to say that what he meant was that as communication moves so much more toward the visual, and away from reading and writing words, do writing and reading actually gain in importance or lose ground? As your exposure to computers, the internet, social media, tv, visual advertising and mass media, and short-form/sound-byte content have increased, does it make you want to read and write more, or less? Has your own capacity for taking in information one way or another increased, or decreased, or remained unchanged? And how do you feel about it?

January 16, 2014

Since this photo was taken, we've had quite a bit of rain and warmer days here, and the sidewalks, for the most part, have shed not only the snow but also their coating of bulletproof glare ice that has called for cleats and crampons. But we all know we're heading into the long haul now: those endless months of February and March when it seems like winter will never loosen its grip -- or perhaps I should write, as the French do when speaking of flu, its grippe.

As for me, I went in search of a vaccination anti-grippe last Friday, and ended up at a public clinic above a pharmacy, where I waited for nearly two hours before the infirmiare called me for the ten-second procedure. There was no line for shots, nothing like that -- just the long wait that everyone complains about in the public sector, and then a quick, efficient, competent health care provider and well-equipped, spotless lab at the other end. I was fortunate; a lot of clinics have run out of vaccine just as the flu season starts to peak. But I came down with a cold anyway, this week, and today stayed home, drinking tea with lemon and ginger and piling up tissues in the wastebasket.

This cold has been having its way with our choir, especially since we've had a number of performances and extra rehearsals lately at which everyone is required if at all possible. On Sunday, as we sang the first piece in the Epiphany Lessons and Carols service near the high altar, I had a momentary vision of all the microbes dancing in the air, released like the contents of Pandora's Box and propelled by the strong lung capacity of thirty singers. The need for musical concentration quickly dispensed with that vision, but I suspect it wasn't far from reality.

Earlier in the day I had reluctantly consumed the communion wafer placed in my hand which had just shared the Peace with half a dozen other souls, but declined to drink from the communal cup. My mother once told me that a former rector of hers insisted that it was impossible to get ill from the shared communion chalice because no agents of deisease could live in the consecrated wine. I wonder how many people still believe that. But even if it weren't for sharing our droplets and shaking one another's paws, all I'd have to do is ride on a few metro cars or buses, where everyone is hacking, or touch the poles or railings and forget to wash... and winter would do its work.

So that's just part of life in the north, where we're all forced into cozy indoor togetherness for months on end. I've been glad for this recent thaw, because I've been able to walk outside again without risking a broken wrist or worse. The other night, coming home from leading contemplative prayer, I got out of the metro one stop early and walked north through the park, hoping to suspend the meditative space I was in. No one was skating; pools of water stood atop the ice, reflecting the small blue lights strung in great loops in the trees along the lake's edge. The path was full of mushy snow and a few bare spots, and I made my way with relative ease, stepping off now and then into deeper snow or crunchy, disintegrating ice when the path was flooded. Along with the quiet and the solitude, I felt that exhilaration that only comes in winter: the sharp clean slap of the air on your face, the buoyant heart, the acknowledgement of winter's stark beauty, the thrill of being out in it with a sixth sense of what to do that developed in early childhood.

During the days when it was so icy, I watched elderly people picking their way across streets and along the frozen sidewalks to the shops, and worried for them, wondering if and when I'd join their ranks. Many Canadians, of course, go south for the winter -- and we may escape for a week or two to someplace warmer -- but I can't see myself abandoning this place for the whole season. Life, to me, consists of seasons -- all of them -- and while I'd just as soon pass on the bugs and the grippe, I'd miss that heightened awareness that winter demands, and the pleasure of curling up under a comforter on a cold night with a book and a cup of hot tea. These days, I'm reading Tomas Transtromer, and painting Iceland, and I feel at home.

December 30, 2013

Well, here we are again, at the annual time for lists and compilations and review. I am just back from yet another trip to the U.S., about which more later, but before the year ends I wanted to share my list of books read in 2013. My reading took a nosedive in the fall, as we got so consumed with work and time became shorter and shorter, but before that I had been on quite a reading binge. The two themes for this year were the novels of Hermann Hesse (I'm about halfway through them, reading chronologically), books about Mexico, and books about Ireland or by Irish authors. So here's the list, with a few comments along the way. Happy reading to all of you, in 2014!

Flaubert's Parrot, Julian Barnes (in progress) I loved "Sense of an Ending" but am having a hard time with this one.

Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse I'll write a blog post later, when I finish the novels, but for now just say that reading the writer's entire output chronologically, when most of the books are somewhat autobiographical, has been fascinating, illuminating, and poignant. I first read the famous titles when I was in college, but they're quite different when read as an adult. Hesse writes mostly about the struggle of creative people to live authentically, giving themselves to their work, and the difficulties this presents in their relationships. For him, creativity and spirituality go hand in hand, but as a child of overly-strict highly-religious parents he was appalled and repelled by the typical Protestant Christian rules and doctrine. His novels mirror Hesse's lifelong quest for authenticity, peace, and understanding of his own spirit and creativity.

!!! The Saints of Streets, Luisa Igloria A wonderful book by a poet well-known to readers of Dave Bonta's Via Negativa -- highly recommended.

Lifelines, Philip Booth

Selected Early Poems, Charles Simic

!!!Falling Upward, a Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Fr. Richard Rohr** I found this book inspiring, original, and helpful. Rohr is so intelligent and so no-nonsense about spirituality, and this particular book discussed the development of a mature approach to religion in the second half of life, free of dogma and the images and ideas about "God" that were presented in our childhood and which drive so many of us away from organized religion. He divides life into two haves, the first being about acquisition, belonging, and building up a secure sense of personal identity, and the second about a gradual letting-go of that need to understand, control, and shore-up who we are. Most people, he sadly admit, never leave this first half of life. For those who do, the second half is a process of becoming what he calls "elders": people of genuine insight and wisdom who do not divide people, but have become wise and gentle guides who can hold everything in balance.

!!!Gorgon Times, Roderick Robinson* An absolutely delightful, true, and entertaining novel about Thatcher-era Britain by a frequent commenter to this blog. The characters are keenly observed and skillfully drawn, and the author makes us care about them. I'm especially impressed with how Roderick writes his female characters; his portraits are believable, and full of amusement and real appreciation that comes across in numerous details. In addition to his excellent descriptive writing, the dialogue is smart, witty, sharp, entertaining, and always rings true: it's a trap for most writers but Robinson handles it far better than many well-known authors. Highly recommended, and available for download for a low price. Read it!

Gate of Angels, Penelope Fitzgerald A good book about British manners, but light. I read Gorgon Times just after this, and preferred it immensely.

Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald Justifiably famous.

Klingsor's Last Summer (with Klein and Wagner and A Child's Heart) Hermann Hesse

Peter Camenzind, Hermann Hesse

Rosshalde, Hermann Hesse*

Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih A classic middle eastern novel; recommended.

Gertrude, Hermann Hesse*

Demian, Hermann Hesse

!!!Narcissus and Goldmund, Hermann Hesse* The novel that began my project; this is one of his later ones, and one of the best. My favorite of the classic novels I read this year.

Ami Underground: Drawings from the NY Subway, Ami Plasse Terrific drawings by one of the urban sketchers I follow. Bought as a present for Manhattanite friend.

Drape, Drape, Hisako Sato Fascinating book by a Japanese designer about how to make clothes using the draping process rather than cut patterns.

The Beaded Edge, Midori Nishida Another book by a Japanese author, but it's actually about oya, the Turkish needlecraft method of making crocheted and beaded edgings for scarves and clothing. I bought it to make the edging for a scarf this past August, and am hoping to try some of the other designs.

Pitch Dark, Renata Adler Entertaining, but the pace and style of this book felt self-indulgent and annoying to me, as if she were trying to show how brilliant she is. Not my cup of tea, but some people do find her writing brilliant. It's a pretty good story, but I could never get over how annoyed I was by the way the characters acted, as well as always being aware of the writing itself.

Confusion, Stefan Zweig A strange small book that I liked quite a lot, about a young man who becomes obssessed with admiration for an older professor -- and the professor's young wife.

!!!John Singer Sargent Watercolors, Erica E. Hirshler & Teresa A. Carbone The catalogue for the Sargeant show (Brooklyn, Boston) contains a number of excellent essays about the painter's techniques and life; extremely illuminating to me as a watercolorist.

The Granta Book of Irish Short Stories. Excellent anthology.

The Empty Family, Colm Toibin A book of stories, also about families and relationships, set in Ireland and a coastal village near Barcelona. Often dark and rather pessimistic, but brilliantly written. I liked it very much.

Brooklyn, Colm Toibin My first Toibin novel; the story of a young Irish woman who comes to New York and works in a department store in the early part of the 20th century; a novel about family relationships and expectations, and women's choices at the time.

The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987 Obviously haven't read them all, but have enjoyed my forays into Paz's work. Reading a bilingual edition; I don't really know Spanish but enjoy reading the poems out loud, and have been surprised by how much I can understand.

The Cat's Table, Michael Ondaatje. Ondaatje is one of my favorite authors. This is not at the top of my list of his work, but it's a very good book, a coming-of-age novel about a child's long sea voyage and the adults he observes.

Imperium, Ryszard Kapusinski. Excellent political/sociological travelogue by a master writer-journalist about his journeys through the former Soviet Union.

The next six titles are all books I read before, during, or after our trip to Mexico City. I won't describe them all here; some are novels, some travel books, some historical novels, and all combined to give me a much greater sense of this complex country than I ever had before. I plan to continue reading Mexican literature and non-fiction; I was embarrassed to realize how little I actually knew about this neighbor and its complex, rich history.

Mogador, Alberto Ruy Sanchez

A Rosario Castellanos Reader,Maureen Ahern and others, translators

!!!Bolero, Angeles Mastretta

!!!First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century, David Lida. The best of the attempts to "explain" Mexico City that I have read. Honest, unflinching, personal.

The Orange Tree, Carlos Fuentes

The Traveler's Companion to Mexican Literature, C.M.Mayo, ed.

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The Life of Pi, Yann Martel ** I listened to Martel's Booker-Prize winning novel as an audio book, and enjoyed it immensely, as well as being touched by the story. Don't particularly want to see the movie; I'd rather keep my own mental images, I think.

The Beloved Returns, Thomas Mann. I love Thomas Mann and have read nearly everythign else; this is a lesser book which may be why it is not well-known. The story of the return of Lotte, once loved by Goethe, to see the great man when they are both old.

The Sea, John Banville. If I had needed convincing, this book showed me why I can't stand John Banville's writing...or perhaps it is Banville himself. Many others disagree.

Himalaya Poems, Ko Un. An amazing set of poems by a Korean poet who should be much more known in the west than he is. Recommended by T.C.

!!!White Egrets, Derek Walcott. My favorite-book-of-the-year award goes to Wolcott's elegeic collection, set mostly in the Caribbean; it is simply beautiful, emotional, poignant, using the English language with such skill, intelligence and simplicity that I found myself setting the book down repeatedly to stare into space, filled with admiration and gratitude.

Word into Silence, John Main, OSB A book on contemplation by the late Montreal monk.

!!!Istanbul Passage, Joseph Kanon ** See my review on Goodreads; the most riveting book I've read this year, listened to as an audiobook. An international espionage novel that transcends the genre.

So -- 43 books in all; 6 books of poetry, 2 books on spirituality, 27 novels, the remainder non-fiction, including four books on art, sewing, and needlework. A pretty typical mix for me, I suppose! As for the dire predictions of recent years that the printed book is dead, I read that The Strand Bookstore actually had its best year ever in 2013, and e-book sales, while strong, have not decimated the print book market. My own reading seems to be bearing that out; while I love having books to read on my tablet and phone, and do read magazines and journals that way, I still like holding real books in my hands. I don't buy as many as I used to, but I still buy some (often as used books), and I frequent the library and am happy when friends lend me titles and often do the same.

Happy reading in 2014: and please send me your own list and favorites for 2013!